previous next

Sewell's Point,

A locality at the mouth of the Elizabeth River, Virginia, where the Confederates erected a redoubt, with three heavy rifled cannon, in the middle of May, 1861, for the purpose of sweeping Hampton Roads. The battery was masked by a sand-hill, but it was discovered by Capt. Henry Eagle, of the National armed schooner Star, who sent several shots among the workmen on the Point on May 19. The fire was returned; five shots struck the Star, and she was compelled to withdraw. That night about 2,000 Confederate troops were sent down to the Point from Norfolk, and these were there on the morning of the 20th, when the Freeborn, Captain Ward, opened her guns upon them. The battery was soon silenced, and the Confederates driven away. This was the first offensive operation against the Confederates in the Civil War.

Harper and Brothers Publishers. . New York. 1902.

Tufts University provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Norfolk (Virginia, United States) (1)
Hampton Roads (Virginia, United States) (1)
Elizabeth (Virginia, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Samuel Ward (1)
Henry Eagle (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
May, 1861 AD (1)
May 19th (1)
20th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: